As Star Trek fans mourn the death of beloved actor and ‘geek grandfather’ Leonard Nimoy, another group is expressing a different stance. The Westboro Baptist Church hinted Friday at plans to picket Nimoy’s funeral, using a variety of slurs too offensive to be repeated here.

It’s worth noting that the Westboro group doesn’t always show up when they threaten, and, perhaps more encouraging, that when they do show up, there are frequently counter-protesters, who hold up their own signs, or even block access so that the group can’t get close enough to the event to cause extra pain to the family.

That the whole universe is one ginormous connection of sentient entities.

We've seen videos of turtles showing empathy (and the Golden Rule perpaps), in helping another turtle get back on its feet when it flipped on its back.

Scientists have discovered that crops and other plants send out super sonic screams for help during droughts. The ants that invade the classrooms when the rains come show self-awareness and knowledge that each individual is in danger when a finger comes at it as it tries to hide under a book or paper on a desk.

I am sometimes haunted by the memory of a young live oak tree that grew very swiftly in our back yard. Our drain field was no longer working and we had to have a new one built. The health department, which issued the permit for the new drain field, said the live oak had to go.

As the tree surgeons began to first trim off the large branches, the tree began to tremble and shake. Even when the saws were silent and the men stepped away from it to adjust the ladders and other eqipment, the tree did not stop shaking until it was down.

I believe that the whole of everything is on a constant cycle of life, chage, death, renewal and rebirth. "Therefore," as John Donne once wrote, "never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for there."

L“Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious’ parents in our study,” said Bengston in an interview with Zuckerman. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”

“For secular people, morality is predicated on one simple principle: empathetic reciprocity, widely known as the Golden Rule. Treating other people as you would like to be treated. It is an ancient, universal ethical imperative. And it requires no supernatural beliefs.”

And check this out: according to Zuckerman, atheists “were almost absent from our prison population as of the late 1990s,” accounting for less than half of one percent of inmates according to reports by the Federal Bureau of Prisons. “This echoes what the criminology field has documented for more than a century,” he writes, “the unaffiliated and the nonreligious engage in far fewer crimes.”

Additionally, a troublesome report from BBC last year found that religious children were less likely than their non-religious peers to distinguish fantasy from reality, based on a study conducted by Boston University. Presented with realistic, religious, and fantastical stories, children were then asked whether they thought the story was real or fictional. Researchers found that “hildren with a religious upbringing tended to view the protagonists in religious stories as real, whereas children from non-religious households saw them as fictional.” And why is this problematic? Because it muddies the waters of a child’s differentiation between reality and fiction, says the study, and even the spiritual from the fantastical.